Lessons

Lesson Info

11:45 am - Displays

So the displays are going to be dealing with what you see in the viewfinder, what you see on the back screen of the camera and a lot of what that information means and howto work with it. So we have the viewfinder where you hold it up to your eye this and this is the best way to use your camera in most situations, but sometimes we're gonna have to use the lcd monitor when we're using live you movie view and then it's well, it's going into the menu settings alrighty, let's, jump in to figuring out this viewfinder. So when you do look through the viewfinder, first off, the framing of your subject is ninety eight percent accurate. You're getting two percent extra around the edge, so you're going to get your getting a little bit more than you bargained for it's kind of a safety protocol that they put in here so that, you know, if you got on call henry's head in there, it's not going to crop it out, but be aware that if you are lining things up very exactly, you're going to get a little bit...

more on the final picture. Next up, we've talked kind of at length about the auto focus points on the camera, the nineteen focusing points in the different groups. Will be illuminated depending on how you have him set up, and then along the top of the viewfinder, you will see the different versions of the focusing patterns the single point the zone which chooses either four or nine points or you're going to see brackets around the outside indicate that you have chosen all nineteen points at the same time, if you'll notice right in the very center is a small semicircle indicating where the spot metering area is. A centre waited is not indicated. The semi spot metering with a partial metering is not indicated, but the spot is one of the cool things that you can do in this camera is turn on the grid pattern. This is going to be buried in the menu setting in the shooting menu number one, but you can turn on elektronik grid display. Some people like this who are doing architectural life works, sometimes landscape photographers who want to make sure that they have their horizon level. There are some other tools, some people don't like the clutter and they want to leave it turned off, so make your decision and we'll get that program, then to your camera pretty soon here, next up is a specific elektronik level in your camera, and what this does is it gives you indicators as to whether you're tilting your camera to the left. Or to the right now, we did talk about this if this seems familiar before, but what this is is it's in the viewfinder as you're holding it up to your eye. And so if you have your camera and you just want to see it in here, there will be an option to see it if you're holding it on the back of the camera. There's a separate and different view finder level or it's, not a viewfinder level it's just level in that case. So there are multiple levels on this camera, and this is something that you could turn on. In fact, one of the options, if you remember the will mirror, not mere lock up the depth of field preview button down here, this could be reprogrammed to turn on that level so that you could see it. Next up is a warning sign in the right hand corner that's going to pop up if the camera is in a certain mode. And one of the beauties of this camera is thatyou comptel win to be warned about certain things. And so when we get into the warnings, for instance, if you have your camera set to shoot black and white, that might be a cool thing to do. But you might not want to do that all the time and if you leave your camera in monochrome it would leave that on if you so want to be warned it's also going to turn it on for white balance correction if you've made an unusual white balance choice in there if you've expanded the s o or if you've left the camera in spot me eatery and on all of these you can turn it on or off as to whether it warns you when you have made this change and then down at the bottom we have our full line of information you'll never see it quite like this with everything turned on but let's kind of go through this line up and talk about what you were looking at on this bottom line on the far left just a quick indicator of how good your battery is the auto exposure lock if you'll recall on the back here camera there's an auto exposure lock button when you press that button it stays active for about six seconds you know that it's turned on when this little indicators turn on the flash if you have the flash up and it's ready to fire you're going to see the little lightning bolt in there back earlier remember we're talking about flash and I said that the top shutter speed sync of this camera was one to fiftieth of a second I was lying to you ok, right now it is one two fiftieth of a second, but when you add an external flash on and you put it in its special high speed mode, where it no longer works in the standard tt l system, but under a kind of a special special effects mode, you can get it to fire at up to eight thousandth of a second. The flash is only good for an extremely short period of distance, maybe a foot or two, but it is possible in this would let you know that it is in a special, unique high speed mode. You can also do flash exposure locked. I talk about talked about that with the exposure lock button on the back of the camera. If you do have a flash attached, you would hit this button once it would fire a test flash and lock in and exposure for the next picture. If you do not like the way that the flash is firing its power, you can adjust the exposure of the power, and I'm going to give you a visual example in a little bit on that one, you have your shutter speed information and be aware, obviously, these are often fractions of a second, so if you see two thousand it's one two thousandth of a second, not two thousand seconds. Next up is our aperture also known as r f stop so are too critical number's right there next is we have our exposure level I call it the light meter and the indicator in the middle means you are under even exposure if you see arrows off to the side that means you arm or than three stops overexposed or three stops under exposed so you're going to need to turn some dial a lot in order to get it right back into the centre next up what we have we have r d plus okay highlight tone priority this is where the camera goes in and kind of plays around a little bit with the exposure of your photograph so that you don't lose the highlights I'm not a big fan of this I'm going to talk more about this a little bit later the iso shutter speed will be right here and something to note on the camera is that on the top of the camera the s o button has a little nothing on it it's got a little extra different feel to it and that is there so that we you are shooting pictures you should be able to feel which button it isthe and be able to change so without bringing the camera down to look at it and so you know you've gotten pretty good at your camera when you can change your eso without taking the camera away from your eye down here in the right hand corner the final number is the maximum burst this is the buffer in your cameras to how many pictures can you get right now now right now in this camera I have a memory card in here that is allowing me to shoot nine hundred ninety nine photos which really means it's somewhere over a thousand when I hold it up to my I I have a number of thirty eight in here and I can tell by that number that that is the number of j pegs that it's it's going to allow me to shoot if I was to go in I'm going to change this real quickly too raw and let's change this two wrongs now there we go and now when I look through here my number is down at fourteen which means I can shoot fourteen images in rob before the cameras buffer fills up and it has to slow down and just for fun let's go ahead and let's let's waste some shots here so here's what the buffer sounds like and it's not going to get fourteen it says fourteen but what's going to happen is by the time and it's of the fourteenth shot it will have processed it and will allow it to shoot two, fifteen and sixteen so wait, I gotta put it in the motor drive forgot about that okay with you going very fast the buffers filled up, and now it can only shoot as fast as it can process, and so if you're shooting sports, you want to be careful and shoot in short bursts because I could shoot another burst right now for may be, I guess about five or six shots watch this. You got about four shots out and so it's going to be processing that information, and if we have a camera on the back, you can see this access light is on, which means his writing information to the card and it's not ready to go for a fresh fourteen to sixteen shots until that light is turned off, and that might stay on for another thirty seconds or so. Okay, back to the keen out and the final little dot here on the right hand side is a visual confirmation that you have focused, so if you are manually focusing, you could physically turn the lens until you see that green dot and you would know that you are in focus it's also just going to turn on when you have focused properly, kind of helpful, because I like turning off a little baby when it focuses. I like to go into stealth mode, and so this is just an extra confirmation that the camera has completed its focusing system so that's, what you're going to see in the viewfinder let's, move back to the lcd display in the back of the camera. Okay, so lcd display on the back of the camera. You know, we talked about the touch screen, so I got a little video here just in case I don't get a chance to do that in the live class, so feel free to play. Your image is back, pinch and zoom drag around to take a good look at the sharpness always good to know that you got the picture nice and sharp. One of things you could do is kind of squeeze it until you get a grid pattern and you can scroll through your images very carefully. Double tapping on the image allows you to zoom in to that image, and so we saw that before, but just another quick example of how the touch screen works on this camera. Using the back of the camera is going to be very helpful when you press the cube butt cube button is a quick shortcut to some of the most common features that you would dive into the menu, so in some cases on this camera you will see a feature three different times. There'll be a button on the outside of the camera, they'll be a setting for it in the queue menu, and then there'll be another setting for it within the full menu system. So let's talk about the q menu a little bit so after you hit the cue button you're going to navigate around using all the various controls that we've talked about before and then when you want to enter that mode you'll hit the set a button so the top line is basically just information line not a lot of stuff that you go in and change because there's usually other more direct controls for that on the camera and so you're shooting mode you shutter speed aperture and sl the critical information up there on top the next row is our exposure compensation also our light meters so if you are working your camera in manual you want to take a look at the light meter, make sure you're not over exposed or underexposed or maybe you need to make specific settings for your particular shot that you're shooting I had mentioned this one a little bit ago called flash exposure compensation so let me explain it a little bit when the flash fires on a camera like this how much light do you think where's my flash button come on there we go how much light comes out of that little flash unit? Well, you're not in direct control of it the camera is just plopping out a bunch of light as much as it thinks is necessary and in many cases it's not quite right so here's an example of using built in flash we've added flash to a portrait here which ads in some nice feel like but it's a little overpowered and one of the things that we can do with flash exposure compensation is power the flash down by various increments detail minus one is one stop last her a week ago tt l minus two in this particular example I like tt l minus one it kind of takes some of the edge off for the overpowered flash a lot of photographers a lot of people just don't like overpowered flashes it's better to be underpowered than overpowered on flashes. In some cases, the camera can greatly mistake the situation if there's a dark background if they're wearing a dark color top it's going over, expose the face trying to compensate for all the other dark areas and so for people photography, I often recommend leaving it at tt l minus one in some cases in this case, visual example, I think detail minus two has the most normal skin tones and it's the best of the group. But this varies according to a lot of situations but in general with built in flash or even out on flash I empowering the flash down either two thirds of a stop or one stop it depends on the exact units that you're working with and so this is one setting that I highly recommend powering down a little bit, especially if you do a lot of people photography with flash, we have an option for turning on and off the wifi function will be doing a full wifi function later on in the menu, but there's a quick way to get in and out of it. Next up, we have picture stiles what picture styles are are for people who are shooting in j peg, this doesn't matter in ron, we will talk about raj a pig later on, but if you are shooting in j peg, you can affect the exact look of your image. This is somewhat akin to the old days of film choosing a egg for fillmore fuji film or a kodak film to get a particular type of look, whether you shooting portrait sor landscapes or doing something else and so what's happening here is the camera takes the original information off the sensor and start sweet tweaking with it. And if you can really nail down what you're doing, you're going to produce a j peg that looks a little bit better. The problem is, is that you don't want to leave your camera in the landscape mode when you shit portrait, because the colors are going to be off, and so you have to be really up on staying on this and in general. Any change that you make in camera, you could probably do a better job if you had the time and the program to do it in a computer, and so I recommend just leaving this at standard for most photographers because it just makes a standard set of adjustments and it's consistent. If you didn't know anything about photography and you weren't going to do anything in a computer later on, then you could put it in auto, where it kind of switches back and forth. The next step is if you kind of know what you're doing, you could goes, put it in portrait or landscape, I prefer not to play in those modes at all for myself. I would prefer to to control my images in the computer, where I have a much better view of what the final image is going to look like. The one mode that I do find helpful in this camera is the monochrome mode. If you are interested in shooting black and white, image is one of the interesting combinations that you can do with this cameras. You can shoot raw images, which means you get color full information from the censor, but you can set this to monochrome, which will show you what your pictures look like in black and white in the field and it's hard to visualize some things in black and white, and this takes it and makes it one step easier to see what your black and white images look like so in the field you see black and white results but when you download them at home on the computer you get full color that you can then transfer into black and white if you want to or you could have two versions one black and white in one color the user to find one two and three at the bottom of that list is if you want to go in and create your own little formula for what you think the images should look like and so you can get in there and do that it's kind of a whole area that we're not going to spend much time on but can we cannot I stayed to play in their next up is the white balance this is one of the more important settings that a lot of cameras have specific buttons on the outside of the camera this is one of the main reasons why you would come into the quick menu is it's the quickest easiest way to adjust the white balance which is the color of the scene that you were focusing the wait how is it illuminated what type of light? What is the color of light source and so for natural lighting conditions we have things like daylight cloudy and shade and so if you know the type of light you are working under it would be a good idea to change the white balance to that particular setting. We also have three different settings for artificial light source we have tungsten fluorescent and flash of course flashes balanced neutral light but a lot of tungsten lights which would, which is which a lot of people have in their homes is gonna have a very orange look, if you want to prevent that orange look, you would change your white balance two tungsten under those situations so it's a good chance tto learn about some lamps that you have in your house and what color they are beyond these settings you can go in and set any color temperature you want on the kelvin scale and so there is a way to manually jump into the camera and specifically set the calvin in here. And so if you knew it's fifty five hundred degrees you could set it at fifty, five hundred degrees. A lot of people that work in that manner but if you have a studio situation will be very helpful. We also have a custom setting and the way the custom setting works is you would photograph a white sheet of paper and the camera would look at the photograph of white knowing that it is white and it would determine what color lights are illuminating that piece of paper and that could be very handy if you need to get accurate color and you're dealing with a mixed light source or just kind of unusual lights that you weren't sure what they were you photograph a white sheet of paper, you come to custom and he would choose that photograph I'm not going to go through the full button sequenced to set it up and then you would set your camera to cuss and it would customize it for that specific color and then the final option is auto white balance and this is where the camera will just look at the scene and try to figure out what the white balance setting should be at and as much as I love manual on cameras, this is the one setting that my camera is mostly in automatic not all the time but I keep in an automatic for two pretty good reasons number one the camera does a really good job at adjusting the color for the type of light source that I'm in it's rarely way off it might be a little off, but it's rarely way off the second reason I keep it there is because I'm mostly shoot in raw if you decide to shoot raw files, it doesn't matter where the white balance is you can fix it later with no damage to your photograph, if you are shooting and j peg and you shoot with the incorrect white balance, you will be able to fix it not quite to the same extent as you can fix it in raw and you will be damaging your photograph in a very small manor and so if you do set j pegs you need to be a little bit more on your game when adjusting white balance with raw it's less important having said that when I am in a situation where I know what my light source is going to be for a large period of time if I'm out photographing a cross country race and it's cloudy and it's going to be cloudy we are here in seattle remember that and it's cloudy I would probably set my camera to cloudy because it's a very simple click and it's something that would prevent me from having to do extra work later on down the road so always trying to fix things earlier in the in the game is always better but if you shoot raw you don't have to worry about this but get it done in the camera right right shoot it right in camera all right next up is white balance correction okay let's just say you set the camera two tungsten and it wasn't perfectly right for the tungsten lights you have in your house you can go in and tweak the custom city or tweak the uh tungsten setting exactly to the temperature of your lights and this is when one of the warnings might come on in the viewfinder I've never needed to do this if you shoot in raw it's unlikely that you would need this, but if you really want to customize the white mountain setting, you could also do it. You can also get in there and do something called white balance bracketing if you're not sure the color temperature you could suit shoot a series of pictures at different white balances, which seems like an awful lot of work and would be a whole lot easier in my mind just shooting a raw image. But if you were shooting j pegs it's an option, next up is something called auto lightning optimized. We're going to talk more about this in the menu system. I don't like this. This is where the camera goes in and starts tweaking with lighting values of your subjects. It's often it's it's trying to be helpful, it's trying to lighten up the shadows in many cases so that you can see people a little bit easier. So I'll show you more a little bit later on that one. Next up on the far right of this column or this row is custom controls. This is where you get to go in and customize several of the different features if you want to do back, but focusing. What you could do is you could go in and turn off the auto focusing of the shutter release so that you could only focus with the back button and so in order to take a picture, the two step process would be a focus. Get that done, be come up, wait for the right timing and take the picture. And as you take the picture, the camera's not going to try to refocus, which is a real nice system, too, not have to focus lock anymore. Next up, bottom row are some features that we've already talked about. Remember we talked about the autofocus mode there's a button on the top of the camera called a f this does exactly the same thing. The a f area button. We talked about that before controlling which areas that you focus, the drive mode, there's a dr button on the top, your camera it's just here again, as is the meeting. So these air basically nearing the buttons on the front of the camera and then the image quality. We're going to talk more about this in the menu setting about choosing raw and j peg, but you could do it as a shortcut right here.